Film and Reflexivity

[Chris Stolz]

> the novel.  I think film, an obviously fake version of reality,
> desperately needs directors who comment on their own work or
> medium within the medium."
> 
> 
> That "lack of experimentation" in film is true enough in mainstream terms,
> but to suggest that film is unique is like saying that the novel lacks
> experimentation (which again is true in mainstream terms).  There's a long
> and rich tradition of self-reflexive filmmaking, and indeed the
> very essence of the "classical Hollywood style" has been to
> work against or minimize the
> potentially disruptive elements of looking at a series of images projected
> as 2-dimensional images on a screen.


	I would like somebody to try and describe why, as Ethan
says, we desperately need more self-reflexive filmmaking.  I
personally find that one or two movies doing this sort of thing
are quite enough, since (as with fiction), self-reflexivity, as
demonstrated by the likes of Calvino, Barth, Bartheleme etc.,
rapidly becomes candy-floss po-mo game-playing rather than
serious artistic endeavour.  In film, we have work by Resnais,
Truffaut and the independent filmmakers whose work nobody ever
sees.  However, what characterises films like _Hiroshima, Mon
Amour_ is that the filmmkaer makes the self-reflexivity work as a
metahor for something else, rather than leaving reflexivity as
an end in itself.  After all, the proposition made by an artwork
reflecting on its own unnaturalness very quickly exhausts its own
reflective possibilities if unconnected with further thematic
connections.

	American film, which is at its basic mythical level
purely psychological (Lynch), sociological (the Western, marriage
comedies) or religious (Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino) does not
lend itself to purely artistic, aesthetic reflexivity, i think.
It would be the Europeans who would experiment with this kind of
form, since their cinematic traditions do not have as their
primary concern the Americans myths of societal foundation,
Puritan redemption or psychological archetypes.  

	By the way, to my mind, the two closest cinematic
analogues to the work of Pynchon are 

1)  Terry Gilliam's _Brazil_

2) Antonioni's _Blow-Up_, maybe the masterpiece of '60s cinema.


-- 
chris stolz		16 oakview pl. sw calgary ab canada t2v-3z9
cstolz at acs.ucalgary.ca	(403) 281-6794


"But you must admit that our ignorance is manifestly of a very rich 
and varied sort?" said Ulrich.


			Robert Musil, _The Man Without Qualities_